Kids For Cash

“Lead by example and you will teach others without having to say a word.” This is a quote that my grandparents would always instill in both myself and my siblings. Growing up in a traditional Polish family the phrase “it takes a village to raise a child” was very accurate. I can remember every member of my family playing a role in my upbringing. We were taught to respect authority and if you did something wrong you would be held accountable for it.
At my high school there was a zero tolerance policy which meant regardless of an act committed in school or out of school you would be held accountable. We had the local police stationed within the school which handled such matters. It was well known that if you did something wrong you would be going to “juvie” regardless of the severity. I noticed my junior and senior year that many students were being “locked up” for extravagant amount of time for small level offenses. For example, my neighbor got into a fight with his father at the dinner table. He threw the steak sitting on his plate in anger. His father, a military man, wanted to teach him a lesson so he called the police. With his intentions being to have the police speak with him in regards to authority. In all actuality his son was brought out in handcuffs, went before a juvenile judge and spent six months in a detention center followed by probation.
In 2008 the truth as to why teens were sentenced to extreme punishments for the acts committed was revealed. I was living in Philly when I started seeing the news broadcasting about, Wilkes-Barre a small town in Pennsylvania where two Juvenile judges were being accused of receiving kickbacks to ensure the private juvenile detention center didn’t have empty beds.
Judge Ciavarella, 58, along with Judge Conahan, 56, corruptly and fraudulently "created the potential for an increased number of juvenile offenders to be sent to juvenile detention facilities," federal court documents alleged. Children would be